The Trump administration on Thursday transferred all of the Venezuelan migrants it had brought to the U.S. military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, suddenly emptying a detention operation that it had just as abruptly started this month.
Two passenger planes operated by Global X, a charter aircraft company, flew to the naval base on Thursday morning and shuttled most of the migrants to an airfield in Honduras. They were to then be put aboard a Venezuelan plane for repatriation.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said 177 migrants had been transferred to Venezuelan custody, and one had been brought back to an immigration facility in the United States. In a declaration filed in court earlier on Thursday, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official had said 178 Venezuelans were at the base.
It was unclear whether the administration intended to send additional migrants to the base.
The transfers cleared out the migrants at a time when the operation has raised numerous questions about whether the government had legitimate legal authority to take people from ICE facilities in the United States to the base in Cuba for continued detention. Immigrant rights’ lawyers have gone to court seeking access to the migrants, and rights groups have been expected to file a broader challenge to the Trump administration’s policy.
“It’s a way to avoid litigation from getting traction,” said Harold Hongju Koh, a Yale Law School professor who worked as a lawyer in the State Department during the Obama administration has long been involved in litigation over detainees at Guantánamo. He added: “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
The turnover took place at the Soto Cano air base, where the U.S. military’s Southern Command has maintained a presence for decades, a statement from Honduras said.
The Honduran government said it was facilitating the transfer for what it described as humanitarian reasons.
On Jan. 29, Mr. Trump directed the U.S. military and the Homeland Security Department to prepare to expand a migrant operations center at Guantánamo Bay, saying it would “provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States.”
The military began transporting migrants to the base on near daily flights from an immigration site in El Paso, starting on Feb. 4. In announcing the first transfer flight, the Pentagon cast the operation as a “temporary measure” to secure the migrants “until they can be transported to their country of origin or other appropriate destination.”
All of the migrants taken to Guantánamo to date have been citizens of Venezuela. It has been difficult to deport people to the country because of the breakdown in relations between its authoritarian government and the United States.
But a Trump adviser, Richard Grenell, visited Venezuela in late January and appeared to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough, which included an agreement that Venezuela would resume accepting deportees. On Feb. 10, Venezuela sent two planes to El Paso to pick up about 190 of its citizens, whom the Homeland Security Department described as under final deportation orders.
As the flights resumed, it has not been clear why some Venezuelans were taken to Guantánamo.
Trump administration officials had initially portrayed the migrants taken to Venezuela as members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which the State Department included on a list of transnational cartels and gangs the administration designated as foreign terrorist organizations on Thursday.
But it is not clear whether that is true for any of the migrants: Congressional staff were told in a briefing that the only actual criteria to be sent to the base was being Venezuelan with a final removal order.
As of Wednesday, Ms. McLaughlin, the homeland security spokeswoman, had said simply that ICE was using Guantánamo “to house detainees subject to final orders of removal.” She also referred to them as “final order aliens.”
In a lawsuit seeking legal access to the migrants, the government told a court that it had allowed three men named in the suit to call lawyers on Monday and that “preliminary access procedures have been developed for others at the facility.”
But the Justice Department also urged a judge not to require broader access, arguing that the migrants had only “limited rights” as “immigration detainees with final orders of removal, who are staged for final transfer and in the midst of a removal operation.”
The Trump administration has raised the possibility of eventually housing tens of thousands of migrants at the base. With the future of the policy unclear, Lee Gelernt of the American Civil Liberties Union, the lead lawyer for the immigrant rights’ groups seeking access to migrants at Guantánamo, said the fight was far from over.
“The government saying we can now have access to the detainees only after they have moved them is perplexing, at best,” he said. If the government was trying to make the lawsuit moot, he added, “they will not succeed.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Albert Sun from New York.
